About book Every Good Boy Deserves Favor & Professional Foul (1994)
"Professional Foul" is a TV play from the late 70s. The main characters are professional philosophers, attending a conference on ethics in Prague. The central tension of the play concerns a humorless British moral philosopher who believes in unbreakable moral principles and a former (Czech) student of his who is in trouble with the authorities and asks the prof to smuggle his doctoral dissertation out of the country. The humorless prof thinks that he shouldn't do this because he's a guest of the Czech government. This problem strikes me as something not even approaching a real moral dilemma--obviously the prof should help his student out. Eventually he realizes this and decides to smuggle the dissertation out, but he knows he'll be searched on the way out of the country. So he hides it in another prof's luggage without his knowledge. This move seems like a moral mistake. Why couldn't he ask the other prof if he'd be willing to do it? The philosophical significance of the play is therefore pretty light. But there is a funny scene that involves a linguistic philosopher lecturing about how formal theories of meaning won't be able to explain meaning in English because in literature, the author can create deliberate ambiguities that aren't meant to be disambiguated. Insofar as a formal theory of meaning for a language requires disambiguating all expressions of the language, and insofar as such a theory is required to explain fictional uses of language, this seems to present a problem. But it's merely an apparent problem, I think, because the theory could presumably allow that certain uses of expressions can carry more than one meaning (explaining double entendre would raise the same kind of issue).
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